– Gamified Marketing and Facebook –

We all know that higher engagement is the gateway to more interested customers, which leads to people who buy more often, which leads to more money on the bottom line.

According to many sources, a good level of fan engagement on Facebook is 1% and above.

Yikes.

Is Facebook the Most Valuable Site on the Internet?

At the same time, Facebook has become an increasingly important tool for brands to reach their consumers. In fact, for some brands, a robust Facebook brand page is actually the best channel they have for reaching out and engaging with their customers.

A recent study with Shareaholic and BuzzFeed found that in the end of 2014, just over 31% of all traffic driven to a site came through social media.

That’s pretty powerful.

So can you guess which social media channel drove the most traffic?

As you can see from this chart, Facebook drives a quarter of traffic to websites. Pretty impressive. But, when it comes to the power of Facebook, that’s not all.

Facebook’s more than 1.44 billion monthly active users around the world spend an average of 20+ minutes per day on the social network…That accounts for nearly 20% of all time online.

So what does this mean for brands and marketers?

It begs to consider if, for many brands, Facebook is a very valuable site, and one they need to understand how to use correctly sooner rather than later.

They need to be figuring out a way to get their brands more active on Facebook, if they aren’t already. The data clearly shows that brands can benefit from being on Facebook since it’s already an incredible active area for their target consumers, both online and via mobile devices.

This is where reveal marketing can come into play.

Gamified Marketing in Action

The data shows Facebook video has been exploding.

Video is great because it’s new, and it allows for a lot of information to be shared at once. But, video is, for the most part, a passive interaction. In fact, did you ever notice how you don’t even need to click a Facebook video to watch it, as long as you stop scrolling down your browser when you see one, it will automatically play.

So, even though video is very popular, it doesn’t mean that you won’t see high levels of engagement with other types of posts, because the same study highlighted that “Image posts get 179% more interactions than the average Facebook post.”

Now, what does this have to do with gamified marketing?

Quite a bit actually.

We all know how well gamified marketing works when it comes to tapping into consumer psychology and behavior. Because it works to increase engagement by driving up factors like interactivity, perceived value, and curiosity, campaigns on Facebook based around these are going to see much higher engagement levels than your normal ad or post.

That’s why so many brands have been using gamified marketing email campaigns to drive much higher levels of engagement as opposed to the conventional campaign.

Take a look at this example campaign from the fast casual restaurant chain Arby’s done on Facebook.

Here’s the actual post:

So let’s take a look at what’s at play here?

First, you’ve got an image post, which as we know has a much higher engagement rate. Second, the post is all about trivia. Since trivial questions really pull at our curiosity, there is a huge interest to find out the answer to the question, to “scratch the itch” so to speak.

Once the consumer decides to engage with the post and click on the image they are moved up the ladder of interactive engagement.

Now, you’ve already ticked off curiosity, but the consumer still doesn’t have the answer. To get at that there needs to be interactivity. The consumer can actually wiggle their finger over the image and get the answer.

Alright, now we’re getting somewhere. This scratch game does two very important things.

First, it creates active engagement. The user had to click and then play to get the answer, it wasn’t just given to them, it was revealed.

Second, the simple act of scratching has now created a perceived value that emotionally ties the consumer to the reveal.

Researchers have dubbed this “The Ikea Effect” named after the store that makes you build everything yourself, because once you’ve finished building, you automatically have a much higher emotional attachment to that furniture and thus value it more simply because you built it.

So, in order to capitalize on this feeling of ownership brands can do something special after the reveal. Brands can offer discounts or coupons codes, for example. And, because the consumer been driven there by actively interacting with the content, they have already formed a positive psychological bond with the brand (even though they don’t actually realize it yet).

Tying it Together

So it’s easy to see why gamified marketing can matter on social media, and especially a site like Facebook. As more and more brands are seeing decreasing numbers of engagement, while more and more consumers are spending time on the site, it becomes a complex journey to figure out how a brand can get a consumer to engage.

This is where having a gamified marketing campaign can make a huge difference from the start. Not only is it something new and different, it ticks off those all important psychological factors in a way that is specifically designed to make consumers very interested in what you have to offer.

If 25% of all the traffic to your website comes from Facebook, wouldn’t you want those who do come over to already be positively aligned, interested, and excited about what your brand is offering?

If you’re able to capture that, then you’re certainly going to be able to see a difference in conversion rate, brand loyalty, and revenue over the long run.

What do you think about using reveal marketing on Facebook? Have you been able to spot any campaigns?

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